Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party)
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As regards the wind energy guidelines, I do not want to have a repeat of the conversation on rural housing that Senator Boyhan spoke about. I will make the point, however, on rural housing that the Planning Regulator issued its report in 2021 or 2022, highlighting that more than a quarter - I think it was 27% - of housing planning permissions were for one-off housing, so it is obviously not as problematic in some parts of the country as some people make it out to be. I think the Planning Regulator, to paraphrase it, said it is a worrying trend. Those rural housing guidelines would be very welcome as soon as possible to give clarity to that situation.

The witnesses talk about more ambitious targets for compact growth. At the moment, we are saying in the national planning framework that about 40% would be within the settlement boundaries as regards compact growth. Did the witnesses have in mind a figure that would be greater? I think that is not an ambitious enough target. We need to have more compact growth. It will be problematic because people do not like blocks of stuff being built around them once they are settled in an area, and we will have to accept that. We cannot make more land and we cannot have continuous sprawl. We know that cannot work for climate reasons, social reasons and many other reasons. Did the witnesses have a figure in mind or was it just that they felt it was not ambitious enough and they were going to leave it open-ended?